Gene Michieli

I have been making and showing three-dimensional art for over 20 years, always with the idea that my work would be my own both in style and construction.  Although I’ve been influenced by many other artists over the years, I want my own work to stand as a reflection of the ideas and images that occur to me naturally.
  
To that end, I try not to be too critical of images which do not necessarily fit with my previous body of work.  A piece like “Prairie Fire” is quite different in feel and mood from a piece such as “Future Fossil.”  The materials used in the creation of “Warp Drive #2” make it quite different in character from “Eye of the Storm.”  These works all originate in the spaces between the spaces in my subconscious and work their way into the world through a process familiar to anyone who works in a sheet metal fabrication shop.

Images are drawn on large sheets of paper in my drawing studio as they occur to me.  The more intriguing of them are then translated into three dimensions by assembling them with heavy construction paper and tape.  Those that survive this stage become the metal pieces you see in this show.  I deconstruct the paper models and use them as templates on flat sheets of bronze or steel.  The metal shapes are forged with hammer and anvil and welded together at the seams.  The assembled piece is worked with electric grinders, sanders, and what ever else I can think of until it is either pleasing to me or consigned to the scrap pile.  
   
This final editing process is very important.  An artist has to have the ability to accept or reject a work.  I find this particularly necessary in abstract art.  No one really knows what a piece is “supposed to be” but they can tell if it doesn’t work visually.
   
I find it particularly gratifying when someone who normally isn’t interested in this sort of art likes a piece but can’t really say why.  We have practically no art education in this country.  Art in public schools is usually the first thing to be cut in our efforts to produce efficient worker bees and football players.  People have an innate ability to recognize well constructed, well designed art even if they don’t have the vocabulary to describe it.
 
I like to think of my work as sort of a mirror.  You bring your own experience and ideas into the interplay between the piece and the viewer.  You see something of your own ideas in the interpretation; that process fascinates me.  I can only hope the viewer gets as much enjoyment from this work as I had constructing it.  

--GENE MICHIELI 

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